In the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, a regional election has become a mirror held up to the tensions of reunification's unfinished work. The far-right AfD, classified as right-wing extremist by the state's own intelligence agency, is poised for a strong showing by channeling genuine economic grievances—lower wages, slower growth, structural pension gaps—into a narrative of abandonment and foreign threat. Yet the data, examined honestly, reveals a more complicated inheritance: a region not in freefall but in slow transformation, where the explanations offered most loudly are the ones l